


kiss him silly, kiss him sillier

by suitablyskippy



Category: Free!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitablyskippy/pseuds/suitablyskippy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rei is looking more utterly stricken than Nagisa ever imagined anyone with an armful of frozen hot dog boxes even <i>could</i> look – so Nagisa lets him suffer for a moment, and maybe just <i>one</i> more moment more, and another, too – and then he hops up to sit on the lid of the chiller, and says, generously, “I forgive you, Rei-chan.”</p><p>“<i>Please</i> get down from there,” says Rei.</p><p>(Nagisa gets a summer job, a crush of increasingly unmanageable proportions, and enough bad ideas to last him <i>way</i> past graduation.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	kiss him silly, kiss him sillier

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perculious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/gifts).



His first day of summer work involves way less high-speed rubber-burning motorbike police chase action than he’d been anticipating, and Goro-chan’s got no sympathy when he sprawls out across the counter to whine about it. 

“You don’t have a licence, kid.”

“Not having a licence makes motorbikes more exciting,” says Nagisa, and stops sprawling across the counter because there is an empty pizza box on the counter, and he’s just dipped his elbow in a small plastic pot of barbecue sauce. He wipes it busily off on his uniform shirt, which is white and stains but who cares, _everyone_ knows pizza’s one of those foods you haven’t properly enjoyed unless you end up with it all over you. “Because then the customer never knows if their delivery’s ever even gonna _get_ there, in case I get arrested on the way or get lost or forget how to use the brakes and have to drive forever, like, _into the night_ –”

“You’re not even _old_ enough to have a licence,” says Goro-chan. “Lunchtime rush is gonna kick off any minute now and if no one’s got anything to deliver we’re basically screwed, beg your pardon, so you get back to work, alright, kid?”

“I bet they’d let me on the motorbikes if I had a passport with a different date of birth on,” says Nagisa. 

Goro-chan narrows his eyes, but the movement makes the bleach-blond tuft of beard clinging to his chin give one vigorous twitch, and Nagisa’s still laughing about it when his supervisor comes back from the bathroom with her sanitary hairnet clipped on lopsided. 

She’s letting him sneak pepperoni from the great big vat of toppings by the time he breaks for lunch, and by the time his shift is over she’s letting him sneak ham slices, too. It’s not exactly squealing tires and burning rubber and the desperate wail of sirens chasing his pizza-laden motorbike down dark and narrow alleys, but it’s a start, and it’s the first thing he tells Rei about when he whirls into the 7-Eleven two blocks over and finds him in the freezer aisle, dutifully unpacking box after ice-frosted box of oven fries. 

“That seems highly irresponsible,” says Rei, and prises open the next delivery crate. “The risk of potential bacterial transfer from your mouth to your hands to the food would be immense. _Most_ unsanitary.”

“Rei-chan thinks I’m dirty?”

“Eh? – _eh_? That is _not_ what –!” 

“That’s very rude,” says Nagisa, sorrowfully, and presses one woeful hand to his heart. “ _Very_ hurtful.”

“The action is objectively unhygienic! I – Nagisa-kun, I am _convinced_ of your own personal cleanliness, I assure you!”

“You are?” 

“I am!”

“Hm,” says Nagisa. Rei is looking more utterly stricken than Nagisa ever imagined anyone with an armful of frozen hot dog boxes even _could_ look – so Nagisa lets him suffer for a moment, and maybe just _one_ more moment more, and another, too – and then he hops up to sit on the lid of the chiller, and says, generously, “I forgive you, Rei-chan.”

“ _Please_ get down from there,” says Rei. 

Rei’s got a store manager with a long round face like a boiled pear-drop, and though he doesn’t seem all too keen on his staff being followed around by kids in barbecue sauce-smeared Pizza Boy-branded uniforms, Nagisa’s quite sure that that’s a temporary condition, and one he can definitely be cured of. He gives himself forty-three minutes to accomplish the cure, which is also conveniently the exact amount of time Rei has left till he can leave; ten minutes in, he doffs his Pizza Boy cap at Rei’s manager from across the breakfast cereal display, and Rei’s manager wiggles his fingers back. 

“I’m friends with your manager now,” Nagisa informs Rei. 

“Yes,” says Rei, “well. You do have a way of engaging others’ affections.” 

“Rei-chan!” says Nagisa, and flings his arms out wide. “Eh – that _was_ a compliment, right?”

“Solely a statement of fact!” blurts Rei, who is readjusting the line of cornflake boxes Nagisa’s grandly, expansively delighted arm-flinging just knocked half-down. 

“A _complimentary_ statement of fact?” says Nagisa. 

“I – suppose it could be taken as such,” says Rei, rather awkwardly, and Nagisa makes a concerted effort not to knock down any more displays at all, not even one, through the whole twenty minutes of Rei’s shift left remaining. 

 

\---

 

It’s a hot, still summer evening and outside the air-conditioned convenience store it’s humid, the sky a faded blue and the cicadas noisy. They go via the sorbet van parked up outside the shopping mall, and then via the beachfront, which is busy with striped umbrellas, colourful windbreaks, kids in swim shorts and sunglasses celebrating the start of summer break by racing down the rows of sunbathers and kicking up sand, and they sit on the sandy beach wall and survey the peaceful lap of the waves. 

“Do you mind if I ask you something?” says Rei. 

Nagisa considers telling Rei he doesn’t know his three sizes, but if Rei wants to come back with him he’s sure there’s a measuring tape lying around _somewhere_ in his house, and he’d be welcome to help Nagisa find out; but Rei is frowning, in the worried sort of way that means he’s probably running complicated equations about things that just don’t work in equations, like friendship, and breaststroke, and how many scoops of chocolate powder is too many scoops of chocolate powder for one cup of chocolate milk, and Nagisa’s too curious to tease him. So he wipes his mouth free of sorbet and says, instead: “Go for it, Rei-chan.”

“You could have gone home directly after your own work day was complete,” says Rei, “but you didn’t. Was there a – particular reason?”

“Ehhh?” says Nagisa, in a tone of rising scandal. “I’m that forgettable? I came to see _you_ , remember?”

“No!” says Rei, “I mean, yes! Certainly I remember! But I was wondering – I am still wondering, in fact – uh, whether – what, exactly, _motivated_ you.” 

“Motivated me?” repeats Nagisa, thoughtfully, and Rei gives an extremely decisive nod. “Well – my _biggest_ sister’s moved back in cos her new job doesn’t start till August, and my _next_ biggest sister’s home from college for the break and she’s brought this whole bunch of girls back with her and _all they do_ is play Guitar Hero, so I can’t even go in the front room cos they try to put me in her old tutu and get me on drums, and my _last_ biggest sister’s nineteen next week and she’s throwing a pamper party and I dunno what exactly it means, Rei-chan, but my room’s been full of hairstyling things for the last five days and every time she sees me she tries to cover my face in mud, _which_ –” adds Nagisa, with another valiant intake of breath, “– I wouldn’t _mind_ so much if she didn’t keep hiding in my room when the lights are out or I’m not home or I’m in the shower then jumping out with this big green stinky bowl of mud the second I get back in and _attacking_ me.”

“I see,” says Rei. “Practical considerations. Logical.” He sets down his spoon in his bowl, even though he’s still got a good half-a-scoop left in there. 

“But mainly,” says Nagisa, and he grabs Rei’s free arm and lifts it, and pulls Rei in closer till he can fit himself beneath it, “ _mainly_ – I wanted to be with _Rei_ -chan.”

“I see,” says Rei, again. His armpit’s kind of sweaty and Nagisa wrinkles up his nose and tells him so, but Rei’s already got so red in the face it’s pretty hard to tell if it turns him any redder. The remains of his lemon sorbet are turning slushy in the bowl. 

“Are you gonna finish that?” 

“Nagisa-kun,” says Rei, and draws himself up to his fullest height. “Have you ever considered the positive impact that a healthy, regulated training diet could have on your athletic performance?” 

Nagisa bursts out laughing. 

Rei heaves a tremendous sigh and hands it over. 

 

\---

 

It’s the opposite of a splash-battle, sort of, because there are tricks, if someone knows what they’re doing, and when it comes to waging aggressive splash-battle warfare Nagisa _always_ knows what he’s doing. If he gets the right splashing rhythm going he can build up waves so high they slap against the pool wall and come crashing down, on whoever’s been gullible enough to fight with their back to the wall – which is Rei, always Rei, with his elaborate plans for strategic defence that never include the fact Nagisa fights _dirty_ when it comes to splash-battles – and every single time Rei splutters out chlorine water and ditches his plans and launches himself forward, fuelled by revenge, and sometimes Nagisa fights back and sometimes he ducks and kicks off for the deep end, and sometimes he lets Rei catch him up and sometimes he doesn’t, because keeping things unpredictable is a valuable battle tactic – or it is, at least, when he can stop laughing long enough to actually _get_ underwater –

– but the trick, the _point_ of the trick, is to escalate things, sneakily, so it feels like there’s no escalation at all, before the surprise attack comes crashing down. And at the train station, later that evening, in the deserted parking lot outside, when Rei hitches on his backpack and instructs Nagisa on the best pre-bed stretching practices to ensure a sound night’s sleep in the same breath as he expresses his gratitude for Nagisa’s company all through the end of his afternoon shift, that’s exactly how it feels: like Nagisa’s own tricks have just spectacularly backfired. 

It would be just exactly – _beautifully_ – the perfect moment to pull Rei down and kiss him, for Rei is looking down, and Nagisa is looking up, and there is a peaceful stillness stretching out between them that Nagisa rarely allows to exist for longer than the instant it takes him to realise it’s begun. But here it is, and here they are, and though it usually takes Nagisa exactly as long to decide to do something as it takes him to think of doing it at all, the moment this crosses his mind he’s hit all at once by embarrassment so hot and strong he’s probably _red_ from it. 

“Will I see you tomorrow?” says Rei. 

“You _bet_. Sleep tight, Rei-chan – sweet dreams, okay?”

“The variables determining content of dreams are outside of voluntary control,” says Rei, and then he adjusts his glasses with the hand Nagisa’s not still hanging onto, and adds, self-consciously, “but I’ll see what I can do. Good evening, Nagisa-kun.”

Nagisa presses two fingers to his lips and watches, thoughtfully, as Rei goes striding briskly off. He watches till Rei takes the crossing at the end of the street and turns out of sight, the little green figure on the crossing light flashing in the evening gloom; and then he pats his back pocket to check for his house keys, and starts back home, still thoughtful. The cicadas are still whirring, high and shrill and back and forth across the streets. 

The lights in the upstairs rooms are on; the downstairs curtains haven’t been drawn. He’s waylaid by one sister bursting out of the front room with a Wii remote swinging off her wrist, and another sister storming out of the kitchen with an armful of papers to yell at them both to stop yelling, which increases the yelling, and when he wrenches himself away and flees for the stairs and slams the door to his room behind him the peace only lasts for half a second, before another sister hurls herself out from his wardrobe with an unplugged set of curling tongs in hand and a grin full of teeth. 

The fight is brief, and aggressive, and ends with Nagisa exactly as uncurly as he was before but significantly shorter on breath, wheezingly dragging across his bookcase to bar the door. 

“Nagi-i-isa! Nagisa-chan!”

“A growing boy needs his privacy, Ayame-chan!” 

“Oh, yeah, _right_ , you haven’t been a growing boy since you were _fourteen_!” He drags out his box of winter clothes from beneath his bed and rummages through; scarves and gloves and hats with pompoms and earflaps go flying. “C’mon, Nagisa-chan, be nice, you’d look _so_ cute with ringlets –”

“I look cute _without_ ringlets!” yells Nagisa, and snaps on his earmuffs. 

The hammering on his door fades peacefully into nothing under pale blue snowflake-patterned fleece. 

After a minute, he takes them off again. Footsteps are trudging down the stairs. 

Of all the romcoms released in Japan in the last ten years he reckons he’s probably been coercively forced into seeing at least eighty percent of them in the actual cinema, so he knows how this sort of thing goes; and, what’s more, he knows how _hopelessly lovelorn_ goes in full surround-sound and 3D, which has to count for something, probably. His curtains are drawn so he pulls them back and stands at his window, and props his hands on the sill, and surveys the view. The sky is turning a shadowy lilac. The television masts and electricity cables and satellite aerials of the town are sketched in against the sky in black. Nagisa tries a wistful sigh. It kind of just sounds like a deflating lilo. He tries again, but it’s no better, and it’s not exactly stirring up any woeful depths inside his heart, either, so he grabs his camera from the shelf above his desk and flings himself across his bed with a terrible creak of bedsprings that gets whoever’s in the bathroom next door shouting for him to keep it down, and flicks through his pictures. 

There’s a photo of Rei poised grimly at the edge of the pool, wearing yellow waterwings and speedos with go-faster stripes. It’s probably not the sort of thing _anyone_ could manage a wistful sigh over, so Nagisa skips to the next one, which is a photo of Rei half-squinting with his mouth gormlessly half-open. Nagisa considers it. He’s not feeling the urge to sigh wistfully, but maybe it’s the kind of urge that only comes with practice: so he takes a deep breath, ready to let it longingly out, but halfway it turns into a snort of laughter and he rolls onto his back, clutching at his stomach and hooting. Rei probably isn’t the sort of _person_ anyone could manage a wistful sigh over – but no, Nagisa thinks, and rubs his eyes of tears, feeling more than a little weak in the stomach from laughter – no: because Rei is, after all, very beautiful, for all that he’s exactly as ridiculous, and there must be many people out there who would clutch their hearts to see him and swoon as he passes by, and steal his practical white briefs from his locker during swim practice to treasure for their own and use in occult rituals to pagan gods of love. 

Nagisa likes the sound of swooning – dramatically, noisily, perhaps collapsing with a bellyflop from the side of the pool to land right there in Rei’s lane – but the wistful sighs, not so much. He _likes_ Rei. He likes Rei an awful lot. Ideally he would have the sort of relationship with Rei that involved him kissing Rei and Rei kissing back, and both of them sneaking into the locker rooms early enough before practice that not even Haru-chan would be there yet and they could take full inappropriate advantage of the astonishing acoustics in the shower room, but –

“Ugh,” says Nagisa, to his slowly-whirring ceiling fan, with feeling, because the very thought of telling Rei any of this is enough to get embarrassment lurching hotly back into his stomach. There are a million things he’d rather do and not all of them involve skydiving, or finding out just how soft the skin of Rei’s cock might be against his tongue, or both – both? – _both_! he thinks, and things derail for a moment while Nagisa’s skydiving fantasies get rapidly less practical and rapidly more interesting. 

But in the end, though, there’s only one surefire way to take his mind off anything. 

“Rei-chan!”

“Is something the matter?”

“Eh? Wait – Rei-chan, did I wake you _up_? Were you asleep? Are you in bed?”

“You know I like to maintain a regular sleep schedule,” says Rei, and there’s a shuffling sound on his end of the line, and he sounds a little more awake when he speaks again. “ _Is_ something the matter, Nagisa-kun?”

“Apart from the fact you’re in bed before it’s even _dark_?” says Nagisa, and interrupts again before Rei can defend himself. “I think you should quit your job and get a less boring one.”

“Less _boring_! – Nagisa-kun, the role of the service industry is perhaps more crucial in today’s consumer-driven economy than it has ever been!”

“But what if you were a fireman instead?” demands Nagisa, although the last of his embarrassment’s already been driven right out and he’s curling his toes into his sheets from sheer, unbearable fondness. He likes Rei so much he could burst out of his skin with it and that _could_ have been a clue, but it _wasn’t_ a clue, and now that it _is_ a clue it’s the sort of perfect puzzle-solving clue that gets brought up right at the end of police procedural dramas and lands half the cast in jail: except instead of half the cast of a police procedural drama it’s Nagisa, and instead of jail it’s the feeling of unstoppably ballooning affection Rei brings him, swelling up inside of his heart like a slug right after it’s been salted and right before it explodes – except more romantic, probably, and also less gross, probably. 

Rei says: “I hardly think a high school student would be hired for summer work by any respectable fire service.”

“Why would you wanna work for a _respectable_ fire service?” 

Rei harrumphs. Nagisa’d bet the price of takeout for two that he’s pushing up his glasses – or trying to, at least, if he really was asleep, glasses folded beside his bed – and the thought of that alone is enough to get him pressing his arm to his mouth to hide just how hard he’s having to try not to laugh. “Did you call me _solely_ to pester me, Nagisa-kun?”

“You could be – a flight attendant! Or a lion tamer, or a surfing instructor, or a stunt pilot, or a cat burglar, or – or you could be a celebrity ghost hunter! Rei-chan! With your own show! You could have tie-in action figures of you fighting ghosts!”

“I – appreciate the thought,” says Rei, sounding absurdly bewildered, “but your suggestions are impractical, to say the least.”

“I think you’d be a _wonderful_ celebrity ghost hunter,” says Nagisa, quite seriously. 

There is a moment of silence on Rei’s end of the line. On Nagisa’a end of the line, someone downstairs has burnt their toast, and the bitter smell of ashes and the sound of passionate recriminations waft their way upstairs together. “Well,” says Rei, and then he clears his throat, and starts to clear his throat again before seeming to remember he’s already done it, and hurriedly cutting it off halfway with a panicked sort of choking noise. 

“Are you feeling alright?” 

“Perfectly satisfactory!” barks Rei. 

“That’s a relief,” says Nagisa. “Sleep tight, Rei-chan!”

“And yourself,” says Rei, and the moment the line cuts off Nagisa hurls his phone to the side and buries his face in his pillow and wails for a bit, muffled and heartfelt. Then he stops, and retrieves his phone, and chews at his knuckle for a moment before typing out, very quickly, _dreaming of u already rei-chan!!!!!_ and sending. 

Someone’s knocking at his door again. They can wait. 

 

\---

 

Rei keeps his staff security card in the back pocket of his bottle green and immaculately-pressed work pants. Nagisa sidles up behind him the next day, minutes before his shift is due to end, half-chewed pizza crust in one hand, and slips the other inside of Rei’s pocket to fish it out. 

Rei flinches so violently he almost brings down an entire shelf of chilli paste in little glass jars. He spins round, outraged. 

“Clumsy, Rei-chan!”

“You startled me!” 

“I did?”

“ _Certainly_ you did!” 

Nagisa’s shoulders slump, like the weight of his own wretchedness has finally grown too heavy to bear, and he tucks Rei’s staff card into his own pocket and drops his gaze, and says, in a voice of bleak and hopeless woe, “If Rei-chan wants me to keep my hands to myself, I’ll do it.” 

“I didn’t,” Rei says at once – but then he stops, and glares at the jars of chilli paste for a moment, in furious concentration, and starts again. “Nagisa-kun, forgive my discourtesy. Am I correct in surmising that, were I to respond to you now by denying that that was ever what I said, you would respond in turn by expressing delight at the thought – perhaps something along the lines of –” and he puts his hands to his cheeks and then his voice gets higher, barely, but it _does_ , “– oh, so Rei-chan _doesn’t_ want me to keep my hands to myself? And – _and_ ,” Rei says, back to normal, trying desperately to keep his voice down but also to make himself heard over Nagisa’s peals of hysterical laughter, “were I to deny _that_ – Nagisa-kun! – were I to deny that, you would feign confusion until I lost the will to fight and told you – _whatever it is_ that you want to hear!” With a spectacularly dramatic flourish Rei points at Nagisa, now doubled up in uncontrollable hilarity, slapping his knee with mirth. “Nagisa-kun! Am I correct?”

“You are, you are – you’re _ever_ so clever, Rei-chan, you got me –”

“I knew it,” says Rei, and pushes up his glasses with a certain smugness: which turns to sheer panic moments later when he realises the customer who’s been dawdling beside the racks of spices for the last two minutes has in fact been waiting, anxiously, for his attention. 

Nagisa laughs so hard he gets hiccups. 

 

\---

 

The hiccups continue, weakly, for a good half hour after Rei’s shift has ended, till they’re ordering shaved ice at the hole-in-the-wall sweet shop a little way up from the harbour and he makes it through the whole of his order uninterrupted by even a single one. 

“ _Fi-i-i_ nally,” says Nagisa, and he lets out an exhausted sigh. 

Rei smiles round at him, ever so fond, and the urge to blurt out something incriminatingly sincere suddenly hits Nagisa so strongly that he has to blow a kiss, just to hold it in. 

 

\---

 

It’s another late afternoon of warm, damp air. They finish their ice while sitting on the beach wall and then Nagisa slips off his shoes and drags Rei behind him by the hand, down to the shoreline, whooping in exultation while Rei apologises frantically to sunbathers caught in the wake of sand kicked up behind them. He unbuttons his shirt, and kicks off his shorts, and dumps them with his shoes and his Pizza Boy cap in a rumpled and distinctly pizza-scented pile on the strip of dry, sun-warmed pebbles just above the waterline, and rounds on Rei with a not-entirely-gentle grin. 

“A moment, please,” says Rei. 

Rei has already folded his work pants into careful thirds. Rei has already rolled his socks into a ball together and tucked them inside his left shoe. Rei has already folded his work shirt down into a neat and crisply-edged square, and Rei is squatting on the sand in a small and dazzlingly lime-green pair of swim shorts, retrieving his swim float from his backpack. Rei has already thoroughly sabotaged Nagisa’s plans. 

Nagisa’s grin slips right off. He stares at Rei, huge-eyed in astonishment; and then when Rei straightens up and tucks his float under one arm and the lean, tightly-packed muscles of his core shift with the movement, the astonishment turns very rapidly to something else entirely. “You’ve been wearing your swim shorts all _day_?” 

“Haven’t you?” says Rei. 

“Sure, Rei-chan, but _I_ knew I was gonna go _swimming_!” 

“Reasoned analysis of your recent behaviour suggested an escalation in your campaign of provocation,” says Rei, quite studiedly casual, “and it did not seem impossible that you might, at some point, try to engineer a remarkably unbeautiful situation in which I would be compelled to swim with you in my briefs alone.” And he starts wading out, till the shallow waves lap up from his ankles to his knees, as though this is really nothing at all. 

The water isn’t warm. Nagisa splashes out after him. “How long for? Rei-chan! You’ve been wearing swim shorts _all day_? Just in case I wanted to go swimming with you? Since _when_?”

“Well, ah – my estimations had to account for your – for a certain degree of impulsivity, so the numbers were never _concrete_ , but –”

“Since _when_?” 

Rei sighs, but he cuts to it. “Since last Tuesday.” 

“Since last _week_?” says Nagisa, stopping so suddenly that the next wave nearly knocks him off balance, washing around his waist. He seizes Rei’s elbow and pulls, till Rei wheels around and meets his incredulous stare. “Rei-chan, a whole entire _week_?”

“It is always elegant to be prepared,” says Rei, and Nagisa’s just about to start gleefully in on how ever so _in_ elegant it is to be wearing tight sweaty swimwear in the sweaty summer sun under ordinary and probably also sweaty clothes every single day when Rei clears his throat and pushes, ineffectually, at the bridge of his goggles. “I – personally, Nagisa-kun, I find you extremely difficult to read.”

It comes out kind of sombre. Kind of really sombre, for a guy who’s standing in the ocean in nothing but goggles and lime-green swim shorts, clutching a swim float to his chest like it’s a miniature fashion dog while his hair tufts up in every direction with the efforts of the sea breeze; sombre, and painfully sincere. 

It also feels sort of like what Rei’s saying isn’t what he’s actually _saying_ , but that’s – well, that’s pretty complicated, and Nagisa’d rather think about how, right now, he wouldn’t have to do a thing but grab Rei’s wrists and pull him down and kiss him, or grab his hips and pull him in and kiss him, and that would – it’d be _ideal_ , is what it’d be, and then he’d say _could you read that or would you like it in a bigger font, Rei-chan? _and kiss him again, if Rei wasn’t complaining – and all he has to do is _move_ – all he’s got to do is _do_ it –

But instead he grins, and winks, and says: “Oh, but Rei-chan – it’d never be _any_ fun if you knew what I was thinking, would it?”

“Nagisa-kun,” Rei begins – and because Nagisa probably can’t mess up any _worse_ with him in the next few minutes he ducks, right into the low foamy crest of an oncoming wave, and lets out a yowl of underwater woe. It comes out in a torrent of bubbles. He is _hopeless_. 

He bursts back up moments later spitting salt water, reinvigorated, pushing back his hair from his eyes. “We should learn to surf, Rei-chan!”

“Nagisa-kun,” says Rei, chiding. His goggles are blank from the sun but when he dips his head to smile the glare passes, and his eyes are creased fondly up behind them. “I do wish you felt drawn to safer types of fun.”

 

\---

 

The problem, probably, is that Nagisa never thought he was afraid of _anything_ , much, apart from the big and awful things best left unmentioned: danger to his family, danger to his friends, global warming severe enough to dehome the entire penguin population of the Antarctic’s vast and silent ice plains. And he never thought he could be embarrassed by anything much, either, or intimidated by anyone at all – but he flips pizzas into boxes and thinks about Rei, and he claps shut the lids of the boxes and thinks about Rei, and he skids the boxes across the counter to his supervisor and thinks about Rei, and he scoops a modest handful of pineapple from the vat of toppings, because he’s sure he’ll never be too agitated in his _life_ to fail to take advantage of free food, and he chews, and the more he thinks the worse it gets. 

“Hazuki-kun?”

“Yeah!” says Nagisa, at once, and a moment later he startles slightly more awake and glances round. His supervisor’s leaning her cheek on her fist, looking at him with what seems to be mild worry. 

“You did – _mean_ to do that, didn’t you?”

The realisation comes very suddenly that the handful of pineapple he’s currently eating is not pineapple but jalapeno slices, and on the heels of that realisation comes the further realisation that his tongue is burning, and once he’s realised that his tongue is burning he realises that his throat is, too; and Nagisa bolts with a wail of dismay to lock himself into the staff bathroom, his head below the tap, trying frantically to rinse his mouth clean again. It’s Rei’s fault. There’s no _question_ it’s Rei’s fault. His thoughts of Rei have now become perilously distracting, and the situation is chronic. 

His shift drags on. Rei’s not even at work today, so Nagisa can’t even hurry over once he’s free to corner him for several uninterrupted, inescapable hours and alleviate the problem. He feels more tragic by the moment. He’s making plans and discarding plans faster than ever, and some of them are legal and some of them would be suitable for family viewing and some are not, and some would not be, and some revolve around finding a beatbox and a huge pair of butterfly wings and lowering himself from the tree outside Rei’s window blasting thrash metal at two in the morning, so that at least whatever Nagisa does once he turns the music off comes as a welcome change to Rei; but the sort of mechanism he’d need to lower himself from the tree in the first place is the sort of mechanism only Rei would be able to help him build, so he discards that plan, as he discards all the others. 

Nagisa’s so lost in thought on the way home that he nearly gets off the train two stops early, sitting with his feet tucked beneath his seat and staring vaguely out the window opposite. If he could get Rin on side then he could probably persuade the whole of Iwatobi Swim Club to join them in one great big locker room orgy, and at the moment that’s looking like the closest he’s ever gonna get to being anything like honest with Rei. It’d be a whole lot less complicated, and a whole lot less embarrassing, and so long as Gou-chan stayed well away from Rin it’d also be totally incest-free – which isn’t an advantage so much as a bonus, and something he’d definitely mention on the publicity leaflets to be slipped into everyone’s lockers a few hours beforehand. He thinks about it on the train home, at first longingly and then increasingly practically, and the cornfields roll by outside the window, bright and golden. 

The heat is stifling today. Nagisa’s wilting by the time he makes it to Rei’s house, fanning himself with the peak of his Pizza Boy cap. He collapses into the shade of the porch with his arm flopped against the doorbell and his head against the door, and though he hears the bell ring and ring and ring through the house there’s no answer; no answer, either, when he picks himself up and hammers on the door, or when he squats down to holler through the letterbox. 

He prowls down the drive, peering in through shuttered windows, and clambers over the low gate to the deserted back yard. The back door is locked, and he cups his hands to the glass of the kitchen window and squints in, but it’s deserted there, too. Rei’s study timetable is stuck to the refrigerator, lovingly hand-decorated by Nagisa with neon highlighters and glittery stickers of large beetles. 

“A mystery,” says Nagisa, to himself, with some satisfaction, and when he fishes out his phone and flips it open he can almost _feel_ the camera zooming in for the most dramatic possible angle, because in the detective story of his life he is the dark and haunted protagonist while Rei has just become, probably, the destructively gorgeous and hopelessly missing femme fatale. 

The femme fatale answers his phone on the second ring. “Aren’t you meant to be at work?” 

“Swapped shifts!” says the protagonist, spinning the bundle of charms hanging from his phone around one finger. “I always prefer to get off earlier, Rei-chan. Where are you?”

“As a matter of fact, Nagisa-kun, I – _ahem_ ,” says the femme fatale, with an awkwardly stifled cough, and when he speaks again he sounds almost embarrassed. “I’m outside your workplace.”

“Eh?”

“Well, if I’d had advance _warning_ that you planned to change your working hours –”

“You were gonna come visit me?”

“That… _was_ the intention.”

“Rei-chan!” says Nagisa, for a moment too astonished to say anything else at all. “ _Rei_ -chan! Stay right there!”

“I’ve – been here for some time now,” says Rei, more awkward still. “It isn’t impossible that a colleague of yours will ask me to move on within the next few minutes. I suspect I may be obstructing the pavement. Potential customers wishing to enter their premises –”

“I said stay right _there_ , Rei-chan!” Nagisa shouts. 

“Certainly, Nagisa-kun!” Rei barks back, and then he makes a small sound of confusion, like he can’t quite work out why he’s agreeing with Nagisa just because Nagisa talks louder, but he doesn’t complain; and Nagisa’s heart leaps straight into a jubilant somersaulting divebomb inside his chest. 

 

\--

 

The heat is still stifling, and there is still no breeze, and his work shirt’s gone from kind of sweaty to kind of gross, and the train is airless and even worse because someone’s jammed shut the window in his carriage: but Nagisa fans his Pizza Boy cap before his face and thinks about Rei hunting down the delivery station, Rei loitering outside the big plate-glass window, Rei maybe checking his watch for Nagisa, maybe squinting in the window for a look at him, maybe going in and getting himself a pizza menu to try to look less like a skulking juvenile delinquent – he thinks about Rei, and then he feels like his heart is being squeezed very tightly, and the journey is a whole lot more bearable for it. 

 

\---

 

Rei’s looking in the wrong direction, arms folded up high on his chest, surveying the street with his back very straight and his posture perfect. Nagisa stops to catch his breath, just for a moment, red-faced after running from the station; and once the moment is over he takes back off at top speed. 

“ _Whoof_!” says Rei, or something like it. 

“I’m here!” says Nagisa. 

Rei doesn’t reply, but Rei is wheezing and slightly bug-eyed, and might have just been winded from the impact of full throttle Nagisa, so Nagisa presses his hand to the small of Rei’s back and shunts him on down the street. 

“If _this_ is what happens when you try to be spontaneous, Rei-chan, you’re just lucky I like you – I could have _died_ , in this weather, running all over the city, I could have dehydrated and collapsed and just died on the train with all the passengers staring at me and not doing anything in case it was a publicity stunt for refreshing summer beverages and I was gonna get up and start trying to sell it to them in a minute! – all because of Rei-chan! The _least_ you can do,” says Nagisa, in his most reasonable voice, “the _least_ , Rei-chan, to make up for it – you can start with buying me ice cream, but the fancy sort, okay? Three scoops!”

“No,” says Rei, although it comes out as more of a wheeze. 

“Eh?” says Nagisa, startled. He stops where he stands. “Rei-chan?”

“No,” says Rei, again, and his voice is getting stronger. “I apologise whole-heartedly for the inconvenience I have put you through by failing to appropriately plan my spontaneity this afternoon. I am truly sorry for it. But – _but_ ,” he says, when Nagisa starts to point out that the best way for Rei to demonstrate his sorrow would definitely involve ice cream, “with the greatest respect, Nagisa-kun, I have plans of my own for us.”

“Plans?” says Nagisa. 

“Plans,” confirms Rei. 

“ _Spontaneous_ plans?” says Nagisa. 

“Well,” says Rei, and he pushes up his glasses and frowns to himself, the way he does when he’s thinking _way_ too hard, “I could attempt to incorporate – ah, certain impromptu moments, if you think it would be suitable?”

“My _favourite_ kind of impromptu moments _always_ include ice cream,” says Nagisa, vigorously batting his eyelashes. 

“I see,” says Rei, and a little while later Nagisa’s got a cone with three precariously stacked scoops of strawberry ice cream packed inside it, and a sense of profound satisfaction. He’s also got a sense of profound curiosity: for Rei is walking furiously fast up the cliffside path toward the viewing site at the top, and he’s doing it with the sort of very deep concentration that means he sometimes startles out of it and looks around, as though he’s entirely lost track of Nagisa, and breaks into a smile of warm relief every time he sees Nagisa still right there beside him, making industrious and not wholly virtuous work of licking at his ice cream. 

They reach the viewing site: a flat stone slab in a roofless wooden structure, a map of the local area carved deeply in. Rei sits down. He stands back up. From just over the rise come the sounds of a family picnic. The sea is placid blue and choppy, fading to turquoise where it becomes the horizon. 

“Nagisa-kun –” says Rei, and then he removes his glasses and begins to polish them in the hem of his shirt. Nagisa has an ice cream to eat and an ocean breeze to appreciate, blowing briskly through his underarms and whicking up his damp shirt from his skin, and Rei _did_ try to visit him, loitering awkwardly on the street without even a pizza menu to entertain him: so if Rei needs a moment to mentally collect his spontaneous plans together, then Nagisa is feeling generous enough to grant him one. 

At length, Nagisa finishes his ice cream. Rei is muttering to himself, little abortive sentence fragments, gazing intently out to sea with a knuckle pressed to his lips in a posture of deep thought. 

“I’m pretty sure cliff diving’s only fatal if you don’t dive out far enough,” says Nagisa, reflectively. “Rei-chan’s good at long jump, right?”

“The _heart_ of the matter,” says Rei, suddenly loud, as though in the middle of his own conversation, “the crux, so to speak, of the matter – the fundamental point of what is, ultimately, the _matter_ –”

“Eh?” says Nagisa. 

Rei claps his hands to Nagisa’s shoulders and kisses him. 

It’s not his first kiss, because Nagisa was always wily at middle school sleepover games, but it’s the first one he’s wanted as much as this and it’s the first one that’s taken him off guard: it’s the first one he’s not instigated himself, and it’s the first one that can’t be excused by blaming it on truth or dare if it backfires. Everything on his mind turns suddenly to _Rei!!!!!_ and then that’s gone too, wiped out by a rush of delirious happiness. 

Rei’s mouth is dry and very chastely closed, and he doesn’t exactly seem to be breathing. 

“ _Rei_ -chan,” says Nagisa, the instant Rei pulls away, and for a moment he feels as though he’s hardly breathing either – but the power of movement returns to him abruptly and he jumps onto his toes, wraps his arms around Rei’s neck, and tugs him down to kiss him silly – sillier, to kiss him _silliest_. Time seems to stop functioning in the usual sort of way, minute after minute, minutes stretching into decades and snapping back into brief jittery seconds, just as soon as he hears how shakily Rei’s breath is coming, as soon as Rei’s hand finds, tentatively, the soft short hairs at the nape of his neck, as soon as he nudges insistently up against Rei’s lips and Rei parts them, for him, maybe without even _meaning_ to, and that’s hotter still, like he just couldn’t stop himself. 

The only reason Nagisa breaks away is the fact his feet start to cramp from staying on tiptoes too long. 

“I thought you just liked teasing me,” says Rei. It looks like it’s an effort. “Nagisa-kun, _all this time_ –”

“I _do_ just like teasing you,” says Nagisa, and when Rei sits heavily down on the wooden bench beside the viewing site with its view out over all of the ocean, so does Nagisa; or rather, Rei sits and then Nagisa sits on him, straddling his lap, and Rei looks dazedly up at him. 

“Nagisa-kun,” says Rei, and he’s sounding a little shellshocked – but Nagisa’s feeling so drunkenly giddy himself that he’s not certain he’s not still back at Pizza Boy, lost in a particularly engaging fantasy over the pepperoni vat, so he really does understand. “I believe I may have made a fundamental error in my calculations.”

“Oh, Rei-chan, _romantic_!”

Rei huffs, but his face is red. “I believed that if you were sincere in the sentiments you constantly express you would – act on them. Make a move, so to speak.”

“Make a _move_?” says Nagisa. “A _move_? I’ve made a _hundred_ moves on you, Rei-chan! I’ve made a million moves!”

“But – you’re _bold_ ,” says Rei, and Nagisa groans. “You’re forward, and – and _straight_ -forward, and with that taken into consideration the only _viable_ conclusion was that you must constantly wish to provoke me!”

“I told you, I _do_ constantly wish to provoke you,” says Nagisa, in his best Rei voice, except he’s hidden his face in Rei’s shoulder and it comes out sort of muffled. “Rei-chan, this is embarrassing…”

“I jumped to inaccurate conclusions,” Rei declares, “and that is far from beautiful. However – the outcome of those conclusions has been remarkably beautiful, and I attribute that to the spontaneous elegance of my strategy.”

“ _Ever_ so spontaneous,” agrees Nagisa. He looks up and Rei is smiling, so he kisses him, because he can and because he likes him so _so_ much and because, if he doesn’t, then he’s certain Rei is going to start holding forth on the exact parts of his spontaneously elegant strategy he felt to be most spontaneous, and most elegant, and most strategic, and that’s the sort of thing that should come in the post-romance scene for tactics discussion, not the romance scene itself, and Nagisa’s not about to let Rei mess with his cinematography. 

It’s a good kiss. It goes on for a while. Nagisa leans away and takes Rei’s glasses, and puts them on himself, pushes them back into his hair, right out of the way, and leans back in. His Pizza Boy cap is on the ground, probably, somewhere, but it was already tomato-splotched and it’s not like a few grass stains are gonna do it any harm. Rei keeps making these funny little noises and moving his lips around and Nagisa hears, once, mumbled but quite distinctly, “– altered incline of approach –” and bites down on his own tongue to hold back laughter. 

At length, Rei says, “Perhaps I should make a habit of working spontaneity into my routine.”

“Whoa, _whoa_! Slow _down_ , Rei-chan! You can’t just jump into being spontaneous, okay? It’s not like swimming!”

“I’m certain I can handle it,” Rei assures him. 

“There’s gonna be a _ton_ of theory to practise first,” says Nagisa, and he shakes his head, regretfully, as though he’s equally as certain that Rei’s just never gonna be able to handle it. “I mean, you’ll be learning from the master, but _still_ , Rei-chan…”

“Provide me with a list of the few most essential textbooks and I guarantee I’ll have the basics down by Sunday,” says Rei. 

Nagisa bursts out laughing; and then, moments later, so does Rei, with his great deep guffawing chuckle, wiping at his eyes with mirth. 

“Rei-chan!” says Nagisa, in such shock that Rei starts laughing harder. “You _were_! – you were _teasing_ me! Rei-chan, you got me!”

“Learning from the master, Nagisa-kun,” Rei tells him, and takes a breath to calm himself. Then he rests his hands on Nagisa’s hips and kisses him again and really, Nagisa feels, the fact he definitely still reeks of pizza is nothing but a bonus right now.


End file.
